Google facility in Europe loses data due to lightning strikes

After four lightning strikes on a local utility grid on Aug. 17, Google reported that one of its data centers in St. Ghislain, Belgium suffered a power outage that led to "some" permanent data loss.

A Google Cloud Status notification said that "some Standard Persistent Disks in the europe-west1-b zone began to return sporadic I/O errors to their connected GCE instances" and that "approximately 5 [percent] of the Standard Persistent Disks in the zone experienced at least one I/O read or write failure during the course of the incident."

Following a data recovery operation, Google determined that less than .000001 percent of total disk space was still affected, resulting in permanent data loss.

Google said it is replacing storage hardware "to improve cache data retention during transient power lost," and that users should replicate data in multiple locations because storage options are "unavoidably vulnerable to datacenter-scale disasters."

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